Talk:Elabon Series
Never mind the stuff below (unless you want to check your predictions on HW sequels) I have a question on Elabon. The last sentence says this series takes inspiration from Asimov's Foundation series. My question is does it or does it take inspiration from Asimov's inspiration namely Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"? ML4E (talk) 18:09, October 12, 2013 (UTC) Templates As a series it should probably have a template. I shudder to think how such a template could be viable considering that we have next to no articles written on it. Perhaps just one line, for the novels. The template itself would not be complete, but it would add to the completion of the template project in general. Turtle Fan 16:20, April 12, 2010 (UTC) :We should probably have a list of needed templates. A temporary article would do it. We also need Darkness, In High Places, Gunpowder Empire, The Valley-Westside War, and probably a dozen others I'm not thinking of right now. TR 16:48, April 12, 2010 (UTC) ::WBtP needs one. EIaK and GMBML!, but they're in the same boat as Elabon: No articles to speak of. Of course, having a lot of red links on a template might provide an inspiration, as the master lists of historical and fictional articles in 191 and Worldwar did in the old days. :::I was thinking that as well. Certainly the WW template produced a couple of articles. Mostly stubs, but still. TR 17:47, April 12, 2010 (UTC) ::::It might be especially useful for Darkness, since we pick up a couple of eager beavers willing to write about that from time to time. Turtle Fan 18:14, April 12, 2010 (UTC) ::I don't think TWTPE has one, and that's probably the most urgent since that's the current, ongoing project. It's in better shape than the above ones but is still badly underwritten. Even many of the POVs haven't been written. I think that's because we're all pretty daunted by the task of sussing out who did what in a book where no one did anything of note. ::Maybe we should each take one or two POVs and flip through HW rescanning each of their scenes. If we're only reading one character's scenes, they won't run together with all the other characters who are doing the same thing. :::That might be the way to do it. Certainly we have the articles to support the template. Granted, most came out of other works, but still. TR 17:47, April 12, 2010 (UTC) ::::Other works, plus the chance to write new articles about historical figures, are probably the only way HW articles will get written. We can hope it gets more interesting as it goes, of course; that might provide a stronger motivation. Too late to save the POV who died in HW--whoever he was. Turtle Fan 18:14, April 12, 2010 (UTC) :::::A yes, the German tank guy. Given his one-book status, he'll be among the easiest of articles to write. "German Tank guy commanded a tank with Dude and Name Changing Dude. He was part of the attack on Czechoslovakia, then the attack on the Low Countries, then France, where his tank got blown up and he was machine gunned to death as he escaped. He got to watch Hitler rant once. He'll probably be replaced with Jewish Girl's Fugitive Brother." TR 18:22, April 12, 2010 (UTC) ::::::"Ludwig Rothe" is the German translation of "Stephen Ramsay." ::::::I did some searching to find his name. I had to search for "Panzer," which you can imagine gets plenty of hits. I didn't have to look up Ramsay's name. I think it says something about the relative quality of HW and AF that I can remember a one-book wonder's name from the book I read eleven years ago but not from the one I read eight months ago. ::::::I hope Jewish Girl's Fugitive Brother doesn't take over. The idea of a Jewish soldier in the Heer is a novel one, but once you get past the "I hope no one realizes I'm Jewish" aspect, all he'll be able to do is the same stuff Rothe did, the same stuff all of them do. It will be a sign that HT's not interested in diversifying his monotonous cast of characters, and if he doesn't, I have to think W&E will be DOA. Turtle Fan 19:11, April 12, 2010 (UTC) :::::::I think HT pretty well telegraphed Fugitive Brother will be a POV. That's a lot of work for a throwaway character. Granted HW saw much work for no payoff, but it fits HT's pattern of POV change. ::::::::I didn't get the feeling that he was being groomed for POV at all, and I don't see that fitting into any established pattern. Want to have a Patton War over it? :::::::::No war, but I will simply point out Sidroc from Darkness and let it go at that. TR 20:15, April 12, 2010 (UTC) ::::::::::Sidroc I remember as the most unsympathetic POV of all time. Well maybe "unsympathetic" isn't quite the right word; it implies a total indifference to his fate, and every time he had a scene I was emotionally invested in wishing he were dead. For people I don't care about . . . Maybe Rufus Q Shupilluliumash, because his story was so mind-numbingly stupid. Maybe almost any of the HW POVs for boring me to tears. ::::::::::But other than that, I don't remember anything about Sidroc that makes him relevant here. Turtle Fan 23:20, April 12, 2010 (UTC) ::::::::And he's not really a throwaway character. If he never becomes a POV, he'll still be an object of some concern for Jewish Girl. (Somehow inserting descriptions instead of names, which we can't remember anyway, makes the memory of HW less boring. I guess it feels like satire.) On the other hand, it is always nice when POVs in different places have some sort of connection. Makes it feel like the story, which is too large for any one person to cover in its entirety, is still a part of one integrated, whole world. Turtle Fan 19:58, April 12, 2010 (UTC) :::::::::True, not a throwaway precisely. As a matter of personal taste, I'd find HT's decision not to tell the story of Fugitive Brother in War Time beyond Jewish Girl's fretting a missed opportunity. Of course, then I'd be doing precisely what irritates me the most about other readers. TR 20:15, April 12, 2010 (UTC) ::::::::::Sometimes criticizing HT for not doing what you wanted him to is valid, if what you wanted him to do was an obvious avenue for advancing the story, especially in a more interesting direction than it did take. Potter not helping NBF III with his plot, for instance, which led us to believe the plot had been dropped altogether till NBF is suddenly popping up out of nowhere and trying to bore Featherston to death with a lecture. Turtle Fan 23:20, April 12, 2010 (UTC) :::::::I'm hopeful that the extra threat of being a wanted murderer who's a Jew serving in the German Army with People Who Hate Jews could add a bit of edge that other front-line characters don't have. Or, perhaps an opportunity for Fugitive Brother to defect to the other side. A POW POV would be something other than a military POV, anyway. TR 19:22, April 12, 2010 (UTC) ::::::::HT's POWs hardly ever stay POWs. In HW, Czech Orphan Soldier was detained in Poland for a little while. Now while sitting around a DP camp would not have been terribly exciting--especially not in HW's writing style--it would have been another change of pace. Instead we got . . . what we did. Ullhass and Ristin stayed POWs, and had some great adventures (actually they became more like a couple of Lizard Joe Dresnoks in the end), but they weren't POVs. The only POW POVs I can think of who were not sprung after two or three scenes were the two in DoI. I remember that one of them had been given the opportunity to sneak away and try his hand as a resistance fighter when the US forces were ordered to surrender, but he turned himself in instead. I never could figure out why HT took such a long walk just to emphasize that we would have two POWs and no resistance fighters. That's part of the reason I didn't bother with EotB. ::::::::One last thing, and it's that HT's tankmen used to be such interesting characters. Heinrich Jager, Ussmak, Morrell during the big push in GWI when it was actually appropriate for him to be in the line of fire. . . . Sometimes I still read the beginning of a tank scene and catch myself thinking "Ah, here we go!" And then I get . . . German Tank Guy. (I've already forgotten his name again.) Or Michael Pound. Or Morrell acting like it's thirty years earlier and he's a kid again, with no responsibilities at the rear. After HT finally does hang it up, I think I might reread the four WW books, the three Col books, and TL-191 up through VO. That way I'll be able to remember him more fondly. Turtle Fan 19:58, April 12, 2010 (UTC) ::Oh, and The Gap is without a template, but it will stay that way; I believe I'm the only one who's read it, and I was so disgusted by what it turned out to be that I'm flat-out refusing to do any more work on it than I have already. Turtle Fan 17:30, April 12, 2010 (UTC) Elabon: in print or not? In the Elabon series in or out of print?JonathanMarkoff (talk) 17:21, January 21, 2017 (UTC) :I think I saw a new edition not long ago. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:10, January 21, 2017 (UTC) :Two omnibus editions available as e-books. TR (talk) 18:28, January 21, 2017 (UTC) ::I just got a copy of the revised Werenight from a secondhand store. It's a competent, workmanlike example of high fantasy, but didn't knock my socks off. A lot of the story is people travelling from point A to point B, as a New Jersey comedian described The Lord of the Rings ("people walking"), but the final battle provides just enough technical detail to be an excited climax rather than a S.M. Stirling-style borefest. There seems to be a deal of world building going on, but I was a bit more interested in places the story hinted at but didn't go, rather than where it went. I also noticed that when HT thought The Opening of the World Series was a story worth telling, he reused a lot of elements from Elabon.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 22:17, January 26, 2017 (UTC) :::That pretty well meshes with my first impressions. I also enjoyed each successive installment in the series more than the last, so I would have to say that getting the world-building out of the way early paid off. As Mak used to point out, there are three more Foundation novellas waiting to inspire further Gerin the Fox stories (assuming HT would confine himself to the original trilogy) and I wouldn't mind having the series continued. Not that it's going to be. Turtle Fan (talk) 01:42, January 28, 2017 (UTC) Impressions This series is pretty hit-or-miss. A few really exciting chapters will be followed by a really boring one. A likable character suddenly turns into a jerk for no reason. Having only one POV is quite limiting as the world-building goes. And HT often relies on cheap dei ex machinae to get himself out of corners.Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 01:53, December 3, 2019 (UTC) :That last point does make a certain amount of sense when you can sit down across a table from the gods and have a normal conversation with them. :It also follows Asimov a bit. Salvor Hardin figured out early on that nothing he actually did was going to make a difference in seeing off Anacreon's expansionism; Seldon had worked that out long ago, and Terminus's survival was as nearly inevitable as such deft statistical manipulation could make it. That sense of "We'll overcome every crisis without trying" was still around when Bel Riose showed up. Barr and Devers are worried that this complacency has become so extreme as to constitute a change in human nature that would invalidate psychohistorical assumptions, and desperately try to work out, just the two of them, another path to victory. At this they fail utterly; but what do you know, the dead hand beat the living will just the same. The next attack on Terminus did constitute a change in human nature that invalidated psychohistorical assumptions, but HT never got that far in his very loose reimagining. Turtle Fan (talk) 08:14, December 4, 2019 (UTC) TVTropes The TVTropes article on this series is pretty good.Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 12:21, December 25, 2019 (UTC)